Monday, February 24, 2014

Album Review: Blood I Bleed - Split w/ Lycanthropy

Spoiler alert, I really dig Blood I Bleed - I mean not to the point where I'm hunting down information on the internet about their whereabouts between albums or desperately trying to compile a fund to get them overseas to play live, but more of an elevated heart rate/mini-boner kind of thing when I find out they have new material out. I don't know why - I mean I know what it's going to sound like, I don't necessarily need new songs to get my fix of their style, but I think I just really dig their approach to things. It's that high tone, high screech, high treble kind of grind that honestly feels more like the latest evolutionary form of punk music to me than what is passing for it in the mainstream. And dig the low, grindy bass my friends, it's the only thing that keeps this little berserker from pitch-tearing your eardrums into bicycle streamers. Light on the production and scrappy feeling, it's more the vibe of being skeletonized in seconds by a thousand little piranha than the thick and layered over-produced mainline heavy pummeling of fast pneumatic machines that similar genre bands with a bit more of a budget end up sounding like.
The 11 songs in under 10 minute set on this split with Lycanthropy are vicious and approachable, the trade of shriek to foaming bark aesthetic liken this batch of tracks to a gang of rabid badgers chained to a bike rack in Times Square. From the back and forth bag of wolverines-snarling on 'Octane Twisted' and 'Closer To His Grace', to the slow down and bounce of 'Bound Loose' - the songs are fast and grindy but sheened beneath the driving rhythm of powerviolence and injected with just enough skater-punk sounding playfulness to really give the music room to not only breathe, but also swing, spit and kick. There is an overabundance of musicians in extreme music who have spent so many years studying and honing in on their musical abilities that they try to lay their talents down in the studio only to have the end result sound feigned and off-the-mark in it's emotive catharsis because they never focused on the human side of the art, which is flaw and instinctiveness. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there are too many musicians trying to be angry and not enough angry people trying to make music - Blood I Bleed sounds like the latter. As though it would be easier to drive to the pawn shop and get a new guitar than to figure out how to change that broken fucking string, and god bless 'em for it. It hits the mark just right that I still haven't listened Lycanthrope's half of the split, but I'll get to it gents.